Throughout her lengthy career as the host of SBS’s Food Safari, Maeve O’Meara has tried everything from berber tagine to Sri Lankan love cake; oysters in champagne sabayon to pork knuckle with potato dumplings and braised red cabbage – and everything in between.
Yet she can only remember one dish that made her cringe: Argentinean barbecued chinchulines, otherwise known as the second stomach of a cow. “It looked like a science experiment going on to the fire. It came off a little bit golden around the edges but to me that was not delicious food. It was rubbery with fat inside [and] with a bitterness as well. It was like woah, not everything is meant to be eaten. [But] you’ve got to try everything.”
The popular food show has returned to SBS for its sixth season, with Food Safari Earth. Once again the show mixes chefs and home cooks from a variety of cultural backgrounds, all cooking up a storm of exotic dishes.
O’Meara says the show connects with viewers on a variety of levels. “Food tells stories, it’s a great way of being able to showcase the way that we live and the people are around us and the cleverness that surrounds us on our doorsteps.”
After exploring food through individual cultures in the preceding series, the Food Safari producers are now exploring food through the elements. Last season was Food Safari Fire, which looked at dishes cooked over an open flame; and next season will be Food Safari Water, which explores sea vegetables, seafood and all that is nutritious that comes from water.
This season’s Food Safari Earth focuses on cooking vegetables, something that is sure to delight the ever-increasing number of vegetarians and vegans in Australia. It is, as O’Meara’s describes it, “a vegetarian and vegan dream”, but she points out that until recently vegetable-based dishes dominated what people would eat. “To an extent all the cuisines of the world started as vegetable-based cuisines and, for many people, meat was a luxury.”
During filming, the producers came across unusual vegetables prepared in unusual ways. One of the more memorable, says O’Meara, was the Bangladeshi dish shukto, prepared by the Bang Street Food chef Tapos Singha, which includes the green vegetables bottle gourd and drumstick. Another was the plantain bananas which were sliced, popped into acidulated water and then fried to golden, to make “the best chips in the universe”.
Australians do love a food trend – witness the rise and rise of kale – but the next big thing could be dehydrated food. O’Meara spotted dehydrators in the many kitchens she visited, which were used on all kinds of fruit and vegetables: “[Dehydrating is] a great thing to play with but also a way of preserving flavour and adding another texture to dishes.”
Yet perhaps the thing the show does best is showcase the multiculturalism of modern Australian cooking. Where once this was the land of lamb chops and meat pies, where the most exotic meal was sweet-and-sour pork, Australians now appreciate all sorts of different types of cuisines.
“We’re really food-interested, and I think we want to get it right,” O’Meara says. “I don’t think we want the dumbed-down version of a pad thai or whatever. [We] want the real deal and want to somehow connect with those cultures.
“I think that is actually what makes Australia great. We are the great undiscovered secret in the world with our mix of cuisines and our embracing of them. We have great food here, we have great chefs working in Australia and everybody that comes from somewhere else, just goes, ‘Wow, we never knew.’ I think we are a great surprise in the food sphere, there is so much to find … We are a great food country.”
• Food Safari Earth is on SBS on Thursdays at 8pm and online
